Journal
PLOS COMPUTATIONAL BIOLOGY
Volume 7, Issue 5, Pages -Publisher
PUBLIC LIBRARY SCIENCE
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1002031
Keywords
-
Funding
- Canadian Institutes of Health Research
- Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC)
- NIH [GM022778]
- Howard Hughes Medical Institute
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Hammerhead ribozymes are small self-cleaving RNAs that promote strand scission by internal phosphoester transfer. Comparative sequence analysis was used to identify numerous additional representatives of this ribozyme class than were previously known, including the first representatives in fungi and archaea. Moreover, we have uncovered the first natural examples of type II hammerheads, and our findings reveal that this permuted form occurs in bacteria as frequently as type I and III architectures. We also identified a commonly occurring pseudoknot that forms a tertiary interaction critical for highspeed ribozyme activity. Genomic contexts of many hammerhead ribozymes indicate that they perform biological functions different from their known role in generating unit-length RNA transcripts of multimeric viroid and satellite virus genomes. In rare instances, nucleotide variation occurs at positions within the catalytic core that are otherwise strictly conserved, suggesting that core mutations are occasionally tolerated or preferred.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available